In Our Fifth Year
by Nikol Curzon
Summary: The death finds comfort in the living, and vice versa. Tyler/Caroline


Caroline sees their environment as a metaphor. The pall surrounding them, shrouding them in a dusky afternoon, gives her an amazing vantage point from where she observes her first love. He is cluelessly pacing around unnamed rocks, the names on them by long eroded. Looking for something, someone.

Caroline, with an acidic taste in her mouth, knows who. She even knows the exact location of the graves of the Lockwood family: the mayor and his wife lay in the nondescript crypt by the oak tree, it's drooping branches acting as a parasol for the rundown roof. She doesn't know where Mason's body is.

The grooves and valleys on his face reveal his age - 50s - yet his beauty has not receded back into his skin like his hairline has. Caroline pats her own, eternally flawless skin. One regret at a time, she takes.

Tyler is stumbling around, as if he's lost a walking stick. Suddenly, he turns around and looks at her head - on, but Caroline can't bear her wits and flash away. She needs to see it for herself.

That bare

bare

unfeeling.

"Who are you?" he questions, his syllables drawn out, his voice huskier. She wonders if he's carried this cadence from all these years as a wolf. He's been a wolf longer than a hybrid, longer than a human, and Caroline can't relate. Not anymore. She can't relate to this triple existence that must have raged in him all these years.

Caroline smoothes her newly ironed checkered dress out, and takes a step towards him. The leafy tree she'd been standing under had been acting as a parasol, and the sunlight tickles her skin, causing her to shiver. It feels like a threat.

With her hand out, she gives Tyler a teethy smile. "My name's Caroline, I'm here to visit my grandmother!"

Tyler takes it, and his body relaxes, but the corners around his eyes still crinkle with suspicion. His mouth forms the shape of a C, and the movement is so bitterly familiar that Caroline's hand quivers in his grip.

They shake hands, cautiously, longingly.

"Caroline ... what's your grandmother's name?" He asks, almost breathlessly. He lets out a whooping cough a second later that makes her wince. Caroline masks her alarm under a cheery countenance, with a hint of nostalgia.

"Her name was Elizabeth Forbes."

"Sheriff Forbes! Seriously? YOU are her granddaughter?" He looks at her accusingly, and his obsidian eyes scans her form, and that unsurety appears again. A sapling of hope grows within Caroline. Her fingers curls in anticipation. Could it be ...

"I remember a Caroline from high school," he muses, resting his behind on a stray gravestone absently. Caroline stops the chiding expression from appearing on her face. "She was the sheriff's daughter. Are you ... hers?"

"Yes."

"Wow, I think you look a lot like her. You didn't inherit her famous blonde hair, I assume?" His tone is jovial. The corner of Caroline's mouth ticks, almost in a smile.

There is a silence, not much uncomfortable for her, she is used to extended periods of quietude. It is Niklaus' favourite form of punishment.

Evidently, not so much for Tyler, who looks nervously expectant. Caroline frowns, did she forget some social clue? Is she supposed to talk about her 'mother'?

She scratches her neck. The wind chills the skin there.

"Uh yeah, she met my dad when he was visiting town, he was kind of a bad boy you know. Apparently she was into that ... " At Tyler's embarassed expression, Caroline back pedals.

"I think she ran away. I grew up in New Orleans. My mom died a few years ago. It's my grandmother's death anniversary today, so I came to see her. The grandmother I never knew." She adds as an afterthought, embellishing her sobstory.

In a twisted way, a lot of it is true. She died. Twice. Ever since she took up with Niklaus, that part of her heart, was left with a screaming hybrid who's immortality was bleeding out of him. She'd cut it out with a doctor's scalpel and left it clutching in his hand, and rested her head in the bloodied arms of the hybrid who made it possible, staining her hair.

"If you need someone, I'll stay with you. Like, I'll stand a few feet away while you pay respects, so you won't feel alone. I mean, you don't have to agree because you feel pressured, I know how it looks like, I am in my midfifties and stuff, but I won't come too close or anything."

Caroline smiles, the warm breeze blowing her fringe in front of her eyes, fragmenting her vision of Tyler. But she could see each part of him so so clearly.

* * *

"Dear ... grandmother. Although I don't know you so well, and, my mother hurt you a lot. When she ... ran away."

Caroline awkwardly turns to the entity behind her, who gives her an encouraging smile.

She grimaces, looking at the marble gravestone. It is chipping at the corners. Caroline doesn't refurbish it, ever. She leaves the dead well alone.

"I wish I'd known you. My mother told me, if I ever came here, to tell you something. You see, she was very ill, and is no longer with us. Maybe you're with her right now, and you've forgiven her. In case you haven't ..."

"Dear mother. I'm sorry for all the shit I put you through. I'm sorry for never being careful enough, and changing our lives so drastically, for the worst. I wish I'd been there more for you when you divorced Dad. I wish I'd listened to you, and never got involved with bad boys, bad men. I wish I settled for Matt. I wish I had blue eyed children, with their father's tanned skin and his black hair. His prominent jaw. His infuriating smirk. I wish I noticed him before all of this shit happened. That I saw him, how he really was, before it was too late."

* * *

 _"Hold on, Tyler, please stay with me," she begged, cradling her love's head in her arms, her pallor contrasting greatly with his tufts of black hair. Drops of blood mixed with saliva spattered on her skin, but she paid no mind. With the edge of her dress, she patted Tyler's frothing mouth._

 _"Just - go. Caroline." He pushed her away weakly. She remained, tears dotting her vision, dotting her image of Tyler, breaking it in a million pieces like a waterdrop splashing on the ground._

 _His eyes spoke of the strength that his body no longer possessed. Only out of sheer will, did his hand grip her wrist like a vice._

 _"Go, don't see me like this."  
_

* * *

Tyler puts a hand on her shoulder. Caroline doesn't turn around.

* * *

Tyler walks her to the bus station. Or, rather, she walks him. He lives in downtown Pennsylvania. The journey on the road is around 5 hours, but he doesn't own a car.

"My arthritis is like, really bad," he laughs it off, when Caroline teases him over it. The weakness in his leg is apparently always there, ever since he can remember, and only gets worse with age.

As they sit down in the seat, the tinny roof protecting them against the sudden shower of rain, they talk about everything and nothing. Caroline swings her legs to and fro, her Mary Janes scraping the pavement, and she feels what could be the opposite of a petite mort. An underwhelming rush of happiness, making her feel a little more alive.

Tyler is even chattier now than he was then. But it was not as if they talked back then, either. They spoke through their eyes, their souls. Despite their immortality, they had so little time.

It's a little ironic. They still, technically, have not much time left. The bus is due in a few minutes, Tyler 's closer to dying every day, (is already dying, she thinks, eyeing the Marlboro pack peeking out of his breastpocket), and she has a plane to catch to Venice. But Caroline decides to ask him about that wooden cross he wears, under his shirt, anyway.

Tyler Lockwood, captain of the football team, keeper of girls panties, partied on Sundays.

Tyler seems a bit confused at her surprise. "I'm a staunch Christian," he professes, a tone of pride complementing his leathery voice. "Always have been. Sheriff Forbes was too, I think."

Wood burns good, she thinks, suddenly. "We're atheist," Caroline replies.

"Oh, okay."

When the bus arrives, there's a hint of sorrow in Tyler ' s face. Caroline stares at him, pensively. She wonders how many friends he has. She has a card with her details on it in her purse. Her phone numbers. All of them.

Her hand twitches towards her Prada, but slides back to her flaming red bob, tussling the locks.

Tyler stands up, dusting off his knees, and searching in his pockets for his bus ticket. Caroline follows, straightening up gracefully. The chauffeur beeps the horn.

Tyler turns to her, and Caroline interprets his scrunched eyebrows as concern. She slides her fringe all the way to her ear, so she could see him clearly.

"I'll take the next."

He nods gravely, and with just a slightest bit of hesitation, he extended his hand to her. She takes it immediately.

And cherishes. His touch, would never change.

And then he's on the bus. Caroline is still standing in the same spot, with a sad smile on her face. Before the doors close, he turns again to her, and rummages through his pockets. She watches him while he brandishes a crumpled dollar bill with a slight rip at the top.

He holds it out to her with a grimace. "It's for your ticket. I owe your mother a twenty."

* * *

As the bus passes the stop, Tyler spies, in bright glowing letters, a "LAST BUS FROM MYSTIC FALLS", slowly fading out from the screen hanging inside the cubicle. He surveys the stop. The place where he left her, was bare. As if no entity had ever been there.

As the bus rounds the corner, he looks around the area. The rundown motel. The bed and breakfast. The church. No sign of Caroline.

He watches as the bus passes the "Welcome to MYSTIC falls" sign and leans back against his headrest.

* * *

Until we find a way,

she whispered.

* * *

AN: I know this is kind of confusing, and I'm definitely going to make a follow-up chapter to explain the events before, but it's basically a vampire Caroline with an older, human Tyler who does not remember her. And there are obviously some resolved feelings, especially on Caroline's part.


End file.
